Britse soldaten marcheren naar Brandfort, Zuid-Afrika 1901

Curator: "Britse soldaten marcheren naar Brandfort, Zuid-Afrika", from 1901...it whispers stories of empire and conflict. Editor: Well, it’s rather faded, isn't it? Gives it a melancholic feel... a whole horizon line packed solid with those repeating forms makes you feel a long way from home. Curator: Quite right, although a personal feeling, the muted sepia tones suggest the passage of time blurring details while amplifying emotions. Do you think that it somehow diminishes its documentary purpose, even now? Editor: Maybe, maybe not... Look at the sheer quantity of them, though! Presumably the photograph itself had to be quite precisely composed and printed to be so densely rendered, so perfectly replicable. It's the making of it that grips me... Consider the social conditions required to mobilise such photographic enterprise at scale during wartime! Curator: Ah, that replicability... an early form of propaganda maybe? Those sharp uniforms marching toward an obscured background—do they know what awaits? What fate will claim them amidst the wide savannah? The picture whispers to my own experience of marching as a boy! Editor: Don't mistake my materialism for detachment; war, or a call to arms for your former youthful self, does not seem pleasant in any age... the endless supply chain and deployment of manpower for nefarious, commercial reasons that motivated them and, unfortunately, endure even in this digital age. Curator: An endless chain indeed. Yet the photo freezes a single moment from that chain... doesn’t it evoke the futility, that so many individual human moments were just a backdrop? A mass heading forward but never truly *arriving*. Or what if the arrival meant death? Does death change our understanding, or even interpretation of a mere mass of boots and uniform in what we see as a piece of aging print work today? Editor: Absolutely. And from an era that presumed the righteousness of the cause... But this single stereo image belies this and only emphasizes the human material at hand... to build an "empire" upon. Thank you, for pointing to that fact. It has made me more aware of that perspective when encountering old imagery today.